In a letter sent last week to Linux companies, The SCO Group Inc made a number of specific claims about programs within Linux it contends were stolen from its Unix intellectual property. However, several Linux experts, including Linux founder Linus Torvalds, on Monday countered SCO's assessment, wondering if the programs cited by SCO are Linux through and through.

Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, told eWEEK.com there was a good reason why some of the code looked similar. "Do you know that there is not one bit of executable code in those files? They're pretty much all macros and declarations forced by POSIX and other technical standards."

Meanwhile, Bruce Perens, an open-source leader, told eWEEK.com that some parts of the code seemed to show gaps in Lindon, Utah-based SCO's interpretation of evolutionary history. "There are mistakes in the Linux versions that don't exist in the Unix ones, and i386 Linux doesn't even use the same numbers as in Unix, Perens said.

Torvalds went into far deeper detail. "I'm pretty sure the same is true of the 'errno.h' file too (which is then duplicated several times for each architecture)," Torvalds told eWEEK.com.

"In fact, I'm pretty sure the error numbers aren't even the same on Linux/x86 as they are on traditional Unix, exactly because the Linux header file was written independently," he said.